Although today art historians associate a woman at her toilette with Edgar Degas's famous series of nude bathers, shown in Paris at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition and repeated in his oeuvre until about 1910, it is unlikely that Picasso could have seen many examples. Degas had drawn inspiration from the Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and that same source was used by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Auguste Renoir in their development of the theme at the end of the nineteenth century. In an odd twist, however, Picasso chose to suppress in this picture all the eroticism that normally attends the subject. Instead, he turns the picture into a contrapuntal variation on the Holy Family, with echoes of Leonardo's "Virgin and Saint Anne" at the Musée du Louvre.Picasso painted this composition on a much-used canvas: there are at least three complete paintings beneath the present surface.

[Galerie Vollard, Paris; probably bought from the artist in November 1906–at least 1911]; [André Level, Paris]; [Hugo Perls, Berlin, by January 1926–until 1930; sold on May 8, 1930, for $11,000, to Matisse and Dudensing]; [Pierre Matisse, New York, in shares with Valentine Dudensing, New York, from 1930; sold to Clark]; Stephen C. Clark, New York (ca. 1930–37; his anonymous gift in 1937 to the Museum of Modern Art, New York); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1937–51, acc. no. 451.37; deaccessioned in September 1947 for sale to MMA; sale completed in 1951, transferred in December 1953 to MMA)